Ready Player One

Wow, what a giant, loud and busy, colorful noise fest this movie is! When it comes on TV, it can be sponsored by some brand of abusable cough syrup. There are so many pop culture references especially to movies and video games that it seemed like the new kind of product placement. After all, media conglomerates are grabbing up more and more slices of the pie of movie, music and video game content, so the more references there are to other movies and songs and video games they own there are, the more likely they will spur viewers to go and buy or stream that stuff after watching this thing, and so on. So instead of characters in a movie drinking a coke, they're listening to some song the movie company owns, or playing some video game they own, or they've got a movie poster, or some action figure from a movie or comic book the company owns, and on and on and on, and $$$ more for the conglomerate. Pretty soon underground movies will have to try to see how many things they can try to leave out of their movies to deny big conglomerates free advertising that generates more revenue for them to go acquire more and bigger pieces of the media content pie. (Mmm, I'll bet that's good pie! Can you have it and eat it too? I think this movie proves that if you own enough stuff, you can cram it all into a self-referential geek fest and essentially have it and eat it and even bake and sell more and more pies and cakes of it too on and on forever until you give everyone Type 2 Diabetes.)